It’s the week after Thanksgiving for the podcast listeners in America, and you know what that means. Christmas trees, menorahs, stockings, and dreidels seem to be everywhere. The malls are full of shoppers, charities are sending their holiday fundraising appeals, and media outlets everywhere are looking for those heartwarming holiday stories.

We’ll soon see lots of newspaper, magazine, and television features about lives changed for the better. Each of these stories will directly or indirectly highlight the work of nonprofit organizations, and almost all of them will have been pitched by a nonprofit.

Every year, board members and executive directors wonder “how can we get our good work in the New York Times, the Wiregrass Gazette, or the Portland Tribune?“

To help you solve this puzzle, we invited media strategist Peter Panepento to join us. Peter is the principal at Panepento Strategies, a full-service content, digital, and social-media strategy consultancy serving many prominent nonprofit clients: Guidestar, National Center for Family Philanthropy, and the Chronicle of Philanthropy.

Before launching the practice, Peter spent more than a decade covering the nonprofit and foundation world at The Chronicle of Philanthropy — first as a contributing writer and most recently as the editor who managed its online and social media presence, as well as its research and data projects, webinars and new products.

Peter shared the steps for successfully garnering media attention this holiday season, including how to:

Pick the right "story" to meet your goals

Pitch the story to editors/producers

Find the right media outlets to pitch to

Get "media ready" before an editor says "yes”

Build momentum from your media moment

Use your well-crafted story if no media outlet uses it

With the valuable information Peter shared, your organization can pitch its own heart-warming holiday story to the local media. Peter noted it’s not too late to get holiday media coverage, but you’ll need to act quickly to make the holiday news cycle.